New work by Vidick and collaborators featured in Nature Communications

New work by Vidick and collaborators featured in Nature Communications

A new paper, Practical device-independent quantum cryptography via entropy accumulation by Rotem Arnon-Friedman, Frédéric Dupuis, Omar Fawzi, Renato Renner, Thomas Vidick is in the January 31 issue of Nature Communications. Conventional quantum cryptography is already well developed both in theory and experiments. This is not the case, however, for device-independent quantum cryptography, which is the current widely accepted gold standard for security in quantum cryptography. This paper

describes a novel approach that enables the theoretical analysis of device-independent protocols, while providing key rates and error tolerance that are on par with conventional, non device-independent protocols in quantum cryptography. In particular, the work shows that device-independent quantum key distribution is possible in a parameter regime that can be reached in experiments within the next few years.

Our community tried to reach such a result for several years now, but none of the known techniques can be used to derive security statements that hold when the amount of noise is not negligible. To get beyond the “proof of concept” stage and derive results which are of practical relevance a completely new technique was needed; our work fills exactly this gap and acts as the theoretical groundwork for any future quantum device-independent cryptographic protocol and their future realisations in experiments.